From Booths to Beliefs: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach to Elections in Europe
Elena Pro
European Institute, London School of Economics
June 2025
Participation and Democracy 1/2
Participation and Democracy 2/2
Elections & Attitudes
Voting → Attitudes
- Electoral participation is equivalent to behaviourally committing to a political team. This commitment has the power to enhance attachment towards the chosen political team and animus towards political opponents (Dinas 2014; Sorace and Hobolt 2021).
The Downstream Effects of Voting
Growing evidence that voting affects citizens:
- After voting for a party, voters tend to view that party more positively than before the election (Dinas 2014)
- It influences citizens’ presidential candidates’ ratings (Mullainathan and Washington 2009)
- First voting experiences have significant influence on future voting habits, vote choice, and turnout (Meredith 2009; Dinas 2014)
But: Evidence on desirable democratic outcomes is mixed — largely null effects on political knowledge, efficacy, and civic engagement (Holbein and Rangel 2020)
Taken together, these findings might suggest that voting’s primary downstream effects may not be on positive civic virtues, but rather on citizens’ emotional relationships with political groups.
How? A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
- Individuals experience mental discomfort when their behaviours are inconsistent with their beliefs (Festinger 1957).
- To alleviate this discomfort, they may adjust their preferences to better align with their actions.
- When individuals make a choice among a limited set of alternatives, they tend to develop a more favourable perception of their initially preferred option.
- How does this apply to elections?
Can Elections Change Your Mind?
Under a group theory perspective, voting is a declaration of allegiance to a political group which shapes how citizens view themselves and their opponents.
Evidence:
- After voting for a party, voters tend to view that party more positively than before the election.
- Citizens’ levels of Partisan Identity (PID) become stronger among those who vote in alignment with a prior partisan leaning (Dinas 2014).
- The Puzzle: Does this mechanism also apply to animus towards political opponents?
From Dissonance to Coherence
Why first-time voters are crucial:
- Political science recognises the profound impact of initial political experiences on long-term behaviour (Campbell et al. 1960)
- Cognitive dissonance in early voting experiences takes the form of cognitive coherence
- For young citizens, dissonance may be small because it emerges from non-existing or weakly crystallised attitudes
The nexus: - The cost of changing their opinion is very low because they have no priors - Making voting becomes more consequential, more sticky - filling this attitudinal void
What Are We Talking About?
- Polarisation: partisan gap in ideology and policy preference.
- In the US, Democrats adopting more extremely liberal positions and Republicans embracing more extremely conservative ones (Mason 2018).
- Affective Polarisation: the acute tendency of partisans to view co-partisans positively and political opponents negatively.
Us vs. Them
US vs THEM?
- The United States: partisan divisions between Republicans and Democrats (Mason 2018).
The Puzzle: Us vs. them, and them
US vs THEM?
- In multiparty systems, citizens might feel positively, or negatively, towards multiple parties at once (Reiljan 2020; Westwood et al. 2018; Wagner 2021).
Empirical Strategy
Voting ? Attitudes
Data 1/2
CSES (Wave 5):
Cross-national comparison
Running Variable: Year of birth
Treatment: Voting in previous salient election
Outcome: Affective Polarisation and Partisanship
Estimation: 2SLS (optimal bandwidth) and robust bias-corrected inference (Calonico, Cattaneo and Titiunik, 2014)
Data 2/2
UKHLS:
Multiple Elections (2010, and 2019) and Party system transformation
Running Variable: Month and year of birth
Treatment: Voting in current election
Outcome: Affective Polarisation (3 vs. 6 parties)
Estimation: 2SLS (optimal bandwidth) and robust bias-corrected inference
Results: CSES
Main Finding: Voting in salient elections significantly increases affective polarization (both unweighted and weighted)
Effect size: 0.19-point increase in affective polarization, only marginally significant at 0.10 level when estimated with optimal bandwidth
Results: CSES
- No effect of Partisanship
Results: UKHLS Wave 2
Wave 2 (2010): Two-Party Dominance Era
- Context: Labour vs. Conservative dominance (~90% of votes in 1950s, still strong in 2010)
- Results: No significant effect of voting on affective polarization across all specifications
Overall
- Direction of the effect consistent across different datasets, estimations, and party configurations
- Stable across bandwidth sensitivity tests
- Pattern holds for both weighted and unweighted measures
- Effects tend to be significant when there are more parties in the game
Discussion
Preliminary Takeaways:
- Behavioural commitment to a party might have the power to shape attitudes towards political opponents, but it does not necessarily make people feel closer to the chosen party.
- It is possible that developing partisanship is a gradual, habitual process. In contrast, it requires less behavioural commitment to identify political opponents and foster negative feelings towards them.
Context matters: Effects conditional on party system structure — voting seems to produce polarisation in multi-party contexts but not in simpler two-party systems.
Limitations:
- Respondents’ evaluations of parties as a measure of affective polarisation.
- Is this really about cognitive dissonance?
Going Forward
Refining the Estimation:
- Calculate ATT by dividing ITT by compliance rate using turnout data by age group
- Panel setup: differences in affective polarisation levels before and after the election
Understanding Mechanisms:
- Examine consonant vs. dissonant voting patterns using panel data
- Investigate cumulative effects of repeated voting experiences
- Test whether voting for winning vs. losing party produces distinct outcomes
Institutional variation:
Austria (voting age 16) and Brazil (compulsory 18-70, optional 16-17) and Germany (16-17 year-olds vote in municipal but not state/federal elections)
Compulsory voting contexts: Australia, Belgium, Brazil
